The Safari 4 beta is having a little bit of trouble cleaning up after itself, as has been revealed by C. Harwic on his blog. Safari 4 is still in beta, so it's easy to forgive the browser for this rather sloppy housekeeping, which left gigabytes (!) of browsing data in weird places all over your filesystem, even after cleaning the caches or history. Still, this does raise a few questions.

A well-designed application saves all of its own data under one location, not spread all over the system, and if there is something that can be shared with other applications then save that data in a well-known shared location. But what's up with Safari4 saving its stuff all over the place and even trying to hide some of it? Such behaviour shows poor planning and choices being made, and trying to hide some stuff could of course be just another mistake, but it could also be something more sinister.

That shouldn't be a big surprise, given the new tab interface. They're probably hellbent on trying things and not worrying too much about space used.

Also, people have to remember that Mac developers aren't necessarily UNIX developers, so putting things where you expect them won't always be the case. On a 1 user system, there are 3 separate Library folders for things like these.

Besides that, as each update requires a system restart, I'm reminded that Safari is not just a browser but that WebKit is used all over the place.